Tuesday, January 19, 2016

9/28 - Inishowen Peninsula

After Slieve League and dinner in Carrick, we made the drive
up the Inishowen Peninsula (the north-west corner of the country and island) to
Buncrana, arriving after dark. Perhaps because my body was so tired, I don’t
recall being too sick from the ride, thankfully. Our lodging here was at Harbour Inn Hotel, and while it would have
been perfectly nice before our B&B experiences, it now felt a bit cold and
stiff. We had a giant room, but it felt like a Travelodge on I-5 compared to
staying in these lovely homes.

The hotel restaurant and bar felt like something out of a
business convention nightmare, but we found a pub up the road still open and
with interesting reviews and “the best log fire in Ireland”. It turned out to
be only open for drinks, not food – a theme for this area that would come back
to haunt us. Tonight we’d already had dinner down near Slieve League so could
do without snacks/dessert, but the ambienceat the Drift Inn was more like Joe’s
Crab Shack! The fireplace was being hogged (and surely not
the best in Ireland) and the décor was claustrophobic, but we decided to
stay for a drink and then call it a night early. It had, after all, been a
really big day. Ty tried gamely to talk up the local barstool warmer, but he
wasn’t interested. We tried to talk to the bartender, and he wasn’t interested.
Finally, as we were wrapping up our drink, they both decided to talk to us and
it turned out we couldn’t understand a word they were saying, due to the thick Gaelic accent! But we
felt loved by their efforts. We never got their names, but it didn’t matter,
because, again, Gaelic.

Just as our ears were starting to adjust and the
conversation started to take off, a group of rowdy people roughly our age and
roaring drunk butted in, adopted Ty (or rather, cuffed him about the shoulder
shouting “what’s the craic?” to which Ty, not quite catching the words through
the drunken irish tones, answered “I’m Ty!” which endeared him to everyone),
and cornered us for the rest of the night. We were bought drinks, educated
about all of their family in America (mostly in Chicago,
but in case we ever met them… although they may be former neighbors with the
priest who married Will and Keely? We didn’t have the heart to tell them there
might be more than one priest by his name in California, and that if it was
him, he was an ex-priest doing non-catholic weddings). We learned about their
jobs, their drinking preferences, their kids, their childhoods (this group
turned out to be two brothers and their wives who had all grown up together). I
don’t think we’ve ever been privy to so much joyous drunken blabbering – half
of which was too Gaelic to follow. Eventually we pulled away to try to get some
sleep – after all it had been a big day. It still took a good half hour of
extracting ourselves, but we had finally found the craic. Or rather, it had
found us, and had us pegged in a fisherman’s themed bar in the tiny town of
Buncrana on a Sunday night.

I can't find any photos from this day. But here's a nice one of Buncrana a few days later.

And another of various house-warming fuel options for sale at the grocery store. You can see the peat logs on the bottom right.